The Virtual Office

In the workplace, chance hallway meetings convey group status like "Joe's out
sick today", "I'm still working on that proposal", or "I'll get back to you
after my lunch meeting". In addition, hallway encounters build
valuable relationships.

On the other hand, hallway meetings encourage excessive smalltalk, and
distract workers in nearby cubicles. See DeMarco & Lister's
Peopleware, for common problems with physical offices.

A physically distributed work group has no such shared
hallway, and communication suffers. The solution is the
virtual office, which provides essential communication,
relationship building, and
task status more efficiently than hallway chat.

Virtual Office Architecture

Best would be for workers to communicate as needed, efficiently, with
a dusting of social contact.
It may seem strange to engineer people's interactions, but that's
architecture: designing spaces to make necessary interactions happen
naturally.

Our goals are:

To promote productivity by making needed interactions easy;

To foster social interaction;

To reduce interruptions and encourage concentration.

Rather than designing rooms and hallways, a virtual office architect works
with phone and email policies. Our virtual rooms and hallways are: